


red, like the ground outside your window

by kaffas (hoopoe)



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood Magic, Canon-Typical Violence, Curses, M/M, Minimal Navel-Gazing, Priests, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:27:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26704456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoopoe/pseuds/kaffas
Summary: "You're a healer," Geralt remarks, and receives a quick smile before the priest bends back to his task."It was my...vocation,I think the word was in Common.""A calling?""A compulsion," corrects the priest, barbed around the edges. "An opportunity," he seems to remind himself, "to serve the Empire in my greatest capacity. I am humbled and grateful."Somewhere between Nazair and Toussaint, Geralt meets a priest with magic in his voice.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Comments: 21
Kudos: 143





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, it's me. Thanks for bearing with me while I figured out the author's notes. My head is empty. My entire thought process was, "Priest Jaskier? Effervescent." I blacked out and woke up to...this.
> 
> Worldbuilding stuff: In canon, the Great Sun cult (the official religion of Nilfgaard) is a cross between the cult of Sol Invictus, an Elvish nature cult, and what I can only assume is the Catholic or Byzantine Church. Naturally, I’ve picked and chosen stuff for my own purposes here.
> 
> Timeline: N/A. Welcome to baby's first Witcher AU.
> 
> Title from AURORA, "It Happened Quiet."

It is just his luck, Geralt thinks, that he will die this far south. Somewhere between Nazair and fucking Toussaint, bleeding out on the marble steps of some thrice-damned chantry chapel deep in Nilfgaardian territory.

The locals leave the corpses of monsters out to rot in the open air. They inhume their poor. If fate is very, very kind to Geralt, he will be burned as a heretic, his corpse mounted to a stake and set aflame in public spectacle. It is not a proper witcher’s funeral, and his medallion will not be returned to his school.

Resignation. Such is life, and such is death.

Lonely pursuits both. Colder and heavier than he’d imagined.

Before his abrupt drop into blessed unconsciousness, he catches a glimpse of white and gold, the Great Sun embroidered on silk. _Burn me,_ he cannot plead. Here, in this land, he cannot pray, either.

“Oh, dear,” says a voice from above, and Geralt does not know which god it belongs to.

**

He comes to in pieces and all at once, each sense screaming in harmony with the rest. Incense and the droning rise and fall of vespers. Iron and a bitter medicinal taste on his tongue, the oversensitive scrape of his skin against sheets, a wool blanket draped over his hips. His head throbs as he opens his eyes, blinded by the low light bouncing off the ribbed ceiling.

And above it all, that _singing._

Geralt groans. It exits his throat as a weary creak.

He closes his eyes against the pounding at his temple as the singing quiets to a hum, footsteps hurrying in his direction. They come to a stop next to Geralt's sickbed, a fresh wave of incense rolling over him. "Oh, hello," greets a man too chipper by half for Geralt's mood, and the words jar something in his mind.

Oh, dear. _Blood on the white silk stole as he kneels, lays hands on Geralt. A drawn face through the screen of Geralt's lead-weighted eyelids, accompanied by a murmured invocation:_ Don't die, don't die, don't die.

When pain sluices suddenly through him, courtesy of indelicate fingers sliding under stuck bandages, Geralt braves opening his eyes again to settle a glare on the man—

No, _priest._

"There you are," he says with a raised eyebrow and a glint of amusement in his blue eyes as they meet Geralt's straight-on. "Up for vespers, my exsanguinated friend." A description, rather than an order, in quick Redanian Common, and Geralt gives a sardonic blink in reply.

The priest's hands are considerably gentler now as he retrieves a basin of water from a nearby shelf and soaks a rag, pressing gingerly at the dried bandages to loosen them. "I rarely receive comment on the quality of my rite-performance," he laments as he works. "You must have some review for me. Three words or less."

Geralt, for his part, holds himself very still and detaches himself from the pain of wounds exposed to open air. When he looks down his torso to where his gaping stomach has been neatly stitched back in, a mixture of confusion, relief, and despair overwhelm him into dropping his head to the feather-stuffed pillow.

"Changed your stole," he grants. Delighted laughter, subdued into the fabric of a hastily-rolled-up black sleeve. Dissonant against the way the priest— _father_ or _brother_ something, no doubt—measures out herbs into a mortar and begins the efficient process of crushing them to a paste.

"I did, and I'll change this one, too. The brothers at Vizima would have a fit if they saw me dangling it all over your recently...reemboweled...abdomen."

"You could take it off," Geralt suggests as the poultice is applied with the same light touch, the same drawn expression of concentration.

"I could throw it over my shoulders like a scarf, or tuck it into my belt. Very clever, you. Should I also have sung the canticle, read from the _Gloria Imperatoris,_ and recited the litany of Holy Emperors on my way here?" He makes a funny motion with the pestle in his right hand, tracing eight lines radiating from his heart. The sign of the Great Sun, a penitent's request for forgiveness. "You've been asleep for three days. Forgive me if my stole slipped my mind in the excitement."

 _Three days._ Three days slumbering under a Nilfgaardian roof, on Nilfgaardian soil, and Geralt has somehow escaped more intact than he began. Strips of linen on his torso, laid carefully parallel, overlapping. "You're a healer," he remarks, and receives a quick smile before the priest bends back to his task.

"It was my... _vocation,_ I think the word was in Common."

"A calling?"

"A compulsion," corrects the priest, barbed around the edges. "An opportunity," he seems to remind himself, "to serve the Empire in my greatest capacity. I am humbled and grateful." He looks up and smiles again, wanly. "You should sleep through the night." A cup of water is poured and tipped against Geralt's lips, and he drinks obediently. "If you wake—I'm the only one here, apart from the stray traveler. Call for Jaskier."

"Brother Jaskier?"

"Father." He stands and brushes his black trousers into place, smearing them absently with medicine. "Father Jaskier."

**

Geralt’s wound has scarred over nearly completely by the time Jaskier returns, fresh off singing his solitary lauds to an empty, echoing hall. He expresses wonderment and concern, and still does not seem at all inclined to burn Geralt at the stake.

“You helped me,” Geralt grunts by way of conversation. “Why?”

Jaskier cuts him a look, disbelieving and warm. “You were _bleeding_ on my _steps,_ ” he answers, deliberately patient. A busy silence while Jaskier checks and re-checks bandages, hands fluttering, unsure what to make of this miracle of healing. After a moment, he speaks again, this time quiet and reverent. “You were praying. Aloud, don’t know if you were aware of it, but. Asking me to burn you, over and over.”

“You didn’t,” Geralt objects—and he, too, is unsure what to make of this, this deserted priest in the middle of nowhere in his empty chantry chapel, a healer devoted to a religion that shows no mercy.

“We burn heretics,” Jaskier says, and it has that rote sound to it again. “Inhume the poor, monuments to the rich—”

“And monsters get tossed out to the wolves,” Geralt finishes for him, hackles rising, defensive in the quickening of his heartbeat.

“You are neither a monster nor a heretic,” Jaskier chides, pushing Geralt’s shoulders firmly back to the straw mattress. Geralt goes with no struggle, mostly out of surprise. “And not dead, either—you’re welcome for that, by the way—so don’t expect me to burn you now, no matter how you plead.” With that, he bustles off, citing a search for clothing that will fit Geralt, leaving Geralt staring after him.

**

He finds himself clothed simply, in a simple refectory, taking a simple meal of wine, bread, fruit, cheese, and cured meat with Jaskier. Jaskier cuts his wine with water, diluting it down to nothing. “We take a vow to remain uncorrupted by substance or flesh,” he explains, catching Geralt’s skeptical glance, perhaps reading the tacit question on his face.

“Nothing keeping you from it,” Geralt objects, puzzled, off-balance like he’s teetering at the edge of realization. He shakes off the feeling in favor of focusing on the food, ravenous and single-minded after his starving convalescence. Jaskier watches with faint satisfaction playing at the corners of his mouth, eating at a more sedate, human pace.

“I took a vow,” Jaskier repeats, his hand tracing the eight-pointed sun as Geralt washes down a hunk of bread with a deep swallow of wine. “Remaining as a pillar of stone in the face of temptation, all of it. It is—a necessary test of character.”

 _Ridiculous,_ Geralt thinks, and says aloud, “Ridiculous.”

“Surely witchers have a code as well,” Jaskier contends. “Fitting conduct, prohibitions.”

“Stay out of it and keep to the Path. Try to do right by the world and all its creatures.”

Jaskier makes a triumphant little ‘well, there’ noise around his next bite, and Geralt hums in warning. “When we fail, the world goes to shit. It isn’t temptation.”

“And who’s to say I’m tempted?” Jaskier asks, placing a hand out to stop Geralt as he goes for the wine bottle. His chin tips up in challenge, something not pious at all dancing in his eyes.

“A glass?”

“Your name, first.”

“Geralt. Geralt of Rivia.”

Geralt pours. Jaskier takes the glass of uncut wine, raises it to Geralt’s extraordinary good health, and drinks.

**

He takes Jaskier on the floor of the refectory, spread out half-clothed like an offering. Flushed with wine, warm and wanting as he lifts his hips to meet Geralt’s, lips slipping against lips, a hunger in the lines of Jaskier's body that Geralt cannot help but answer.

Against the door of Jaskier’s quarters, Geralt sinks to his knees and buries his face between Jaskier’s legs, the slide of Jaskier’s cock over his tongue transcendent, the demanding curl of fingers in his hair and the strength of Jaskier’s arm as he takes Geralt in return. Approving, the way he kisses himself from Geralt’s mouth after, wine-sweet sounds of pleasure buzzing between them.

When they make it to Jaskier’s bed, it is slower, Jaskier’s open shirt slid from his shoulders, tossed to the floor, marking the end of their journey as scratches and slowly-purpling bruises mark their bodies. Jaskier murmurs something about selfishness and sin, pushes Geralt to the mattress, turns his back to Geralt and sinks down on his cock again.

Geralt spreads his legs, pins Jaskier’s thighs wide and open, lunges up to lick the sweat from Jaskier’s neck and comes inside him, Jaskier wringing pleasure from him stroke by stroke until he follows Geralt over the edge, his head thrown back in an exalted cry.

After, Jaskier slips from the bed and puts himself back together piece by piece, goes to sing his vigil with Geralt’s spend still dripping down his thighs. “You can stay,” he offers, his fingers restless on the fine silk of his stole, “while the world is sleeping.”

Geralt closes his eyes to the sound of Jaskier’s voice rising in song, humming content acceptance when Jaskier’s naked body slides into his arms.

**

Horseless, swordless, and clothed in the dark austere garb of Nilfgaard, Geralt sets out at dawn. Jaskier sees him off with a perfunctory remark about walking with the sun, as if Geralt does not see, does not smell the lingering hunger twisting from him. He thanks Jaskier for his service, praises his skill at healing. Asks, finally, how he can pay the debt he owes Jaskier, and receives another of those wan smiles that don’t quite reach his blue eyes.

“Keep your insides on the inside,” Jaskier requests, fond as a kiss. “If I need you, I'll find you.”

Sensing that he’ll get no more than this from Jaskier, Geralt nods and turns away.

The arachas that bested Geralt is back to the east, so he walks toward the rising sun, calculating out distances as he goes. If he’s expedient about it, he can return to the scene, retrieve the swords he hopes are still buried in the carcass, and deliver his trophy to the alderman at Casadei within the day. After a year of mourning, it is time for a new Roach; perhaps, he thinks, he will seek her out.

Geralt follows the scent of his own blood down the path he ran—

_Arms banded around his stomach as blood gushes, and there is more blood in a body than you’d expect—_

_Slow paralysis of neurotoxins, stumbling over his own feet, the prickling cold as his limbs dissolve into numbness—_

And Jaskier, laying hands on him, steady as his voice commanding Geralt not to die.

“Hmm,” Geralt says to no one as he yanks free first his steel sword, then silver. His trophy knife he extracts from the ransacked bag lying half-buried in undergrowth, hacking off a fleshy flower petal from the insectoid corpse. He stows it in the bag and sets about cleaning its corrosive blood from his twin swords, the routine of it almost meditative after his days of rest.

He is, inexplicably, alive.

He is not long on the path to Casadei before the _inexplicable_ begins to grate. There is no room for miracles in the world of a witcher—and yet, here he is. Not dead.

He walks, and he thinks.

_"Though all arachasae are highly venomous, this breed produces an especially strong toxin. A few drops are enough to kill a grown man—unless that man is a witcher, whose mutations will neutralize small amounts of this venom. Large quantities, however, will kill anything they touch, with mutations only prolonging an inevitable and painful death in such instances."_

An inevitable, painful death with no intervention. It should have come for Geralt, and it did not, because Jaskier—

“The words have power,” Geralt realizes aloud as the barony of Casadei comes into distant view on the horizon. _Don’t die,_ Jaskier had said, and bent Chaos to his will.

**

His new Roach he finds in Toussaint, acquires her for a pittance from a farmer who tells Geralt she isn’t worth the sum he’d get from selling her for parts. Geralt looks the mare in her liquid brown eyes and knows she is Roach, though, and so she is.

The rest of the arachas contract goes to replacing Geralt’s armor and repairing his swords, relaying exact instructions to a blacksmith who openly admits that he would rather not deal with a witcher. Coins and carefully-inked diagrams go a long way, though, and in a week of nights sleeping on the bare forest floor in Roach’s shadow, Geralt has a newly-forged set of armor and two pristine swords.

The notice board advertises missing persons and a cockatrice eating chickens out of a rich man’s coop. Lovers eloped to Novigrad and a hungry pack of wolves, respectively, but they earn Geralt the coin he needs to pay for boarding at the inn; here is as good as anywhere to set up base, for a season.

Dreams plague Geralt, laced with the memory of Jaskier. Vague sensory recollections: a hand between his legs, moans dispersed to echoing rafters.

He wakes, works, lines the coffers of the local brothel with easy coin. Falls asleep in empty beds and dreams of a man he hardly knows, of dark hair, lank with sweat, hanging in bright blue eyes hot on Geralt.

Power in the words. _Your good health, Geralt._ And it isn’t his _good health,_ when he’s kept awake reliving lessons learned at Kaer Morhen a lifetime ago: _Stay out of it. Do not meddle in affairs of man or magic._ Obsession renders him stagnant; he lingers in Toussaint, chasing his tail, too dizzy to move forward.

Weeks of this.

The notice board advertises—

A curse that needs lifting. Interested, able parties should report to Father Jaskier; reward negotiable.

“It came by post last night,” the alderman explains as he nails up the rest of the day’s contracts. “I expect you’ll find your man at Belhaven—the closest abbey is just inside the fortress proper.”

He is wrong, but Geralt thanks him for the information in a few words. He returns to the inn, gathering his belongings and Roach, who has not yet outgrown her youthful impatience. “I hear you,” he promises as she fidgets in place, snorting restlessly.

He does not bother pretending at delay; he knows the way.

**

“It’s you.” Jaskier overacts, his surprise and relief too obvious to be genuine. His eyes take in Geralt, top to bottom, arrayed in his witcher’s gear; his expression softens around the eyes. “I’d rather hoped it would be you.”

“Of course it’s me,” Geralt cuts him off, but loses the rest of his words. How many witchers do you think are running around in Toussaint, he wants to ask, tell Jaskier to drop the mask, demand that he explain how he draws Geralt’s mind and body to him. Fear of the answer throbs, deep and primal.

“Tell me about the curse,” Geralt says instead, brusque and businesslike, and Jaskier shifts on the spot. Opens his mouth, closes it. Hums thoughtfully, the tilt of his head and furrow of his brow betraying his search for a strategy.

Geralt has braced himself for another small deception by the time Jaskier speaks, but not well enough. “I have chosen to devote my life to the Great Sun,” Jaskier declares, demure and pious.

The weeks of frustration make themselves known all at once as Geralt calls a heartfelt, “Bullshit.”

Jaskier presses his lips together, raising his eyebrows and meeting Geralt’s eyes with a low noise of exasperation. “Geralt,” he insists, “I have _chosen_ to devote my _life_ to the _Great Sun._ ”

“I can…see that,” Geralt responds delicately to the distress in Jaskier’s gaze. “And you’re definitely _not_ cursed. Not a hedge witch, either.”

“Naturally,” Jaskier quips, rolling his eyes, and Geralt is seized with the urge to kiss him.

“Stop that,” he orders, astringent, and Jaskier gives him a look of—sincere confusion.

Geralt puts it aside for later. “Why don’t you tell me what led you to your choice,” he suggests instead.

He follows as Jaskier leads him to the apse at the chapel’s east end. A statue of the Nilfgaardian Emperor Fergus, haloed by an eight-pointed sun, scowls down at his adherents. “Kneel,” Jaskier directs, gesturing to the worn prayer rug at the base of the statue, and taps his toe pointedly until Geralt acquiesces.

Jaskier rounds the statue, unfastening some hidden catch with a quiet click. It swivels easily on its pedestal, and as Jaskier returns to kneel beside Geralt, they look together in veneration at a vial of blood, concealed, recessed into a compartment in the Emperor’s back.

“You’re bound here,” Geralt whispers, more to himself than Jaskier, and Jaskier does not look at him, transfixed on the tiny glass bottle that holds him captive.

“I choose to be here,” he corrects. “I am humbled and grateful.”


	2. Chapter 2

"Thirty years ago,” Jaskier begins, “There was a plague in the viscountcy of Lettenhove.”

Circumspect, Jaskier lays out his story from the beginning. He was born the third son to a mother who died in the plague; she returned as a pesta, a plague maiden, to haunt the viscount. Jaskier’s father, at his wit’s end, petitioned the Emperor of Nilfgaard, who, for the low price of sworn fealty and a son placed in civil service to the Empire, hired a witcher to rid Lettenhove of the specter.

“Foolish, my ambition as a child,” Jaskier murmurs. “I was determined to defy my father. I wanted to attend Oxenfurt, you see. To live the glamorous life of a troubadour. The Great Sun, in his generosity, still saw me worthy and received me into the theological college at Vizima. I mastered the healing arts and took my vows in blood, and with them the name Jaskier—I was Julian, before—and this place was given into my care.”

“Vows,” Geralt repeats, and knows the icy clutch at his throat to be _dread,_ the cold force of recognition.

Jaskier lowers his eyes now, to his hands, folded neatly on his bent knees. “To keep whole myself, this house, and those who come within. To keep the eight sacred hours. To faithfully await the Dawning of the Great Sun Over the World, an eternal holy morning bathed in red.”

The lines of his face are etched with pain, when Geralt looks at him, and Geralt cannot speak, his voice withered away to nothing. He swallows hard, forcing back all emotion. “A witcher?” he prompts, and Jaskier’s eyes narrow.

“A witcher,” he confirms. “With silver hair.”

Geralt flees.

**

A dream. A sending.

Jaskier, bathed in firelight, strips his clothing slowly, his presence somehow natural in Geralt's room at Toussaint. “I didn't know,” he confesses as he binds Geralt’s wrists to the heavy headboard, the silk of his stole soft against Geralt's skin, “whether I forgave you or not.”

“Do you know now?” Geralt asks, the edges blurring against a lazy kiss. He spreads his legs around Jaskier’s hips, an invitation and a peace offering.

“At heart…” Two fingers, crooked inside Geralt, the roll of pleasure up his spine as he _writhes_. “At heart, I do. I'd have sung about you. Geralt of Rivia. Destiny's gorgeous jury and judge.”

“Fuck me how you feel,” Geralt grits out, and Jaskier holds him down, fucks Geralt hard and fast and angry, the headboard groaning ominously under the force of Geralt’s pleasure.

The stole rips and Geralt _grabs,_ pulls Jaskier to him, scores red lines down his back and tastes blood in his mouth as Jaskier bites at his lips. “Geralt,” Jaskier says sternly, drawing back to level Geralt with the unbending steel behind his blue, so blue eyes.

Geralt submits.

He comes down from the high still tangled up with Jaskier, the pair of them gloriously naked and sated in Geralt’s soft undyed sheets. Jaskier looks up to search Geralt's face, and Geralt sees the man he could have been: open, curious, recklessly devoted. Overcome, Geralt buries his face in Jaskier’s sweaty hair and breathes deep.

“Help me,” Jaskier breathes against Geralt’s collarbone, and Geralt nods. “When we—when I broke the vow of chastity, the blood magic grew…tighter. I can feel that it, it doesn’t want me to speak to you. This is—what I have, Geralt, I’m sorry about that.”

“I owe you a debt,” Geralt responds, and it doesn’t feel _big_ enough to hold the depth of itself. “I’ll—”

“Pay it, yes,” Jaskier finishes for him. “You never get involved, hm? Except…you do.”

“All the time,” Geralt laments, and they drift into another languorous kiss.

**

There is nowhere to begin. Kaer Morhen is a cross-continent journey away, and even if it were not, its meager library of ancient, worn books is no place to research magic. Blood magic is a construct of the Elves; undoubtedly, it has been mangled by the mages of Nilfgaard, corrupt as all Chaos commanded by humans.

When Geralt wakes, he wakes alone, restless in his room at Toussaint. He aches to do something, _anything,_ to have it over with, his debt paid and Jaskier—

What, exactly? Nilfgaard will not miss their backwoods priest, but what of Jaskier himself?

 _I have chosen to devote my_ life, Jaskier said. Words have power, and the certainty that Jaskier’s vows end only with his death wraps around Geralt’s insides like a clenched fist. He falls back on routine as he wracks his brain, settling at the rickety writing desk and lining up first potions, then raw ingredients, contemplative.

 _Fire,_ he thinks, _to purify._ Curse-breaking is rife with the use of fire.

So he sets fire to the thing binding Jaskier to the church, burns the vial of blood. Jaskier dies, and what then?

 _Clink, clink, clink_ as Geralt slides glass bottles around on varnished wood.

Blizzard, to slow the pulse. Convince the curse that Jaskier has died, and break it then. Nothing to stop him dying after, to restore balance.

Tie him to the world some other way. As Geralt waters his last Blizzard down until it’s safe for human consumption, he can almost hear Vesemir’s caustic lecture.

Geralt, the star pupil, the one who internalized every lesson and set out on the path so many years ago, was a creature of duty, of fulfilling to the letter each order he was given. The Geralt who meddles with blood magic, who painstakingly measures the ratio of potion to spirit, is a man ruled by the forces of fate and choice, come together to test him.

 _What stuff are you truly made of,_ the universe seems to ask, and Geralt answers it with action.

**

“Trust that I know what I'm doing,” Geralt tells Jaskier, who answers him with a bovine blink and a single, solemn nod. “When I'm holding you down, I need you to scream.” Get his mouth open, tip the potion down his throat and slow his heart. “Keep yourself alive. Preferably, don’t explode me with magic. Can you handle that?”

Jaskier huffs indignantly, casting Geralt a baleful glance. Geralt, against his own will, chuckles as Jaskier pouts.

He sobers quickly, peeling off his gloves and unbuckling his gauntlets, placing them aside and offering one bare wrist to Jaskier. Smooth, uncallused fingers trace the blue-black veins stark against Geralt’s pale skin, Jaskier’s lips thinning to a line as he nods. “It will happen fast,” Geralt advises. “Messy. It wants to keep you tied here, but I'm—forcing the scales to balance without it. It’s what I have.” He echoes Jaskier’s earlier words, and Jaskier, after a beat, nods his tacit consent.

“Okay. Open the back of the statue. I’ll prepare the rest.” The rest is a square dish, flat-bottomed so it won’t spill, and the dilute Blizzard potion, the wax seal broken before Geralt palms the bottle.

One last deep breath, centering himself. Jaskier emerges from the apse, and Geralt lunges.

Jaskier—the curse—fights fiercely against Geralt, defending itself from his interference, Jaskier’s nails drawing blood across Geralt’s face. Geralt pins flying limbs to the floor and gets his neck in a chokehold, and Jaskier’s teeth sink into the flesh of Geralt’s hand. Geralt cries out as he feels the crunch of bone and the snap of a severed tendon, and as if remembering his part in this, Jaskier _screams._

 _Push the pain aside._ Geralt unstops the bottle with his teeth, spits the cork out, tilts the potion past Jaskier’s snarling lips and wraps his arm around Jaskier’s jaw, holding it closed, pinches his nose until he’s forced to swallow or choke.

It hits hard, all at once, and Jaskier goes limp under Geralt, splayed on the stone floor, looking entirely dead, and did Geralt miss something, was the ratio off, has he _killed—_

Slow thump of a dying heart, when Geralt stills and listens. Not dead, but soon to be, and Geralt moves fast.

He climbs off Jaskier, hauling him to the apse, depositing him there, his hand bleeding sluggishly as it throbs. “Bowl,” he explains to the unconscious body at his feet, and retrieves said item from the alcove where he’s stashed his bag, out of their line of fire.

The blood, next, and Jaskier gives a full-body jerk, as if the magic is trying to play puppeteer, pull Jaskier’s strings and use him to stop Geralt. Blizzard overcomes it, and Jaskier falls still. Geralt yanks the vial of blood free from the statue’s back, smashes it into the bowl, and forms the sign of Igni.

Flames engulf bowl and blood both. Geralt pours energy into the sign, makes the fire burn hotter, faster, no time. He can hear Jaskier’s heart, slow, too slow to be sustained, but the potion will cycle through his system in a minute, less, no _time._

The flames peter out. Jaskier’s heart stops.

“Fuck,” Geralt groans. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” as he hastily kneels over Jaskier, takes the trophy knife from his belt and seeks the vein at Jaskier’s wrist. Blood wells _—too slow—_ and Geralt flexes his wounded hand, opens the bite wide, clutches Jaskier’s wrist to mix their blood. “One beat, come on, you _ass,_ ” Geralt insists, and Jaskier’s heart gives one last, defiant thud.

Geralt’s blood enters Jaskier’s veins, and Jaskier’s heart picks up. Slow at first, as the potion’s work ends, and then faster, Geralt’s hand at his wrist the whole time. Excruciating seconds stretch into a full minute, then two, and then Jaskier looks up at Geralt and the world…falls away.

“Fuck, Geralt,” he groans, bleary eyes lighting on their bloody arms, Geralt’s hand still wound tightly around Jaskier’s wrist. “Did it work? _Fuck,_ that smarts. Stop bleeding, already,” he grouses, and the blood stops altogether, clotting and scabbing, hours of healing reduced to a fraction of a second at Jaskier’s whim.

“It worked,” Geralt affirms, taking back his hand, grimacing as the mutagens do Jaskier’s work for him, knitting skin painfully back together. “You’re free. Your life is bound to me. Guess my debt’s paid.”

Jaskier pushes himself up to unsteady elbows, raising one eyebrow at Geralt. “Well, now,” he admonishes, bruised and battered and covered in blood, captivating, beautiful. “That isn’t very romantic. I think I'm owed a ‘congratulations, you aren’t dead’ kiss, at the very least.”

He doesn’t get his kiss, but Geralt collapses bonelessly to the floor and winds all his limbs around Jaskier, and Jaskier’s complaints fade to mumbles and then, finally, silence, as exhilaration gives way to reality.

“What will you do now?” Geralt asks, his nose again in Jaskier’s hair. His scent has changed, taken on something of Geralt under his usual _incense-and-human-male,_ and Geralt inhales again, deeper, to catalogue it more precisely.

“Oh, I don't know,” Jaskier sighs. “You wouldn’t happen to know the way out of Nazair, would you?”


	3. Chapter 3

**Epilogue:**

Dressed in the rich colors he prefers—deep blues and reds, expensive dyes that eat through Geralt's meager finances—and sitting carefully astride a grudging Roach, Jaskier resembles nothing so much as a songbird perched uncertainly on a quivering branch.

“Remind me, Geralt,” he begins, and Geralt looks away from the road, keeping a controlling hand at Roach's lead, “where are we going, exactly?”

“East,” Geralt allows. “There's a town at the Edge of the World. Posada. Usually work there.”

“Monsters?” Jaskier prods, fascination clear even as he attempts to sound nonchalant, and Geralt rolls his eyes, turning back to his role as navigator.

“Men.” Breathy ‘ah, yes’ of acknowledgement from Jaskier. “Usually worse, especially where they meet those unlike themselves.”

“You don't say,” Jaskier counters dryly, lapsing into silence.

Not for long. Never for long, anymore; Jaskier is the constant background noise of Geralt's life now, speaking, questioning, singing, healing. He fills up the world around Geralt in places Geralt had not realized were empty, renders it vivid.

_“You think you're safe,”_ Jaskier half-sings, composing a lilting little melody as he goes, _“without a care...but hmm, hmm, Posada...you'd be wise to...”_

“Beware,” Geralt inserts, flat, and feels more than sees the beaming smile directed down at him.

“Brilliant, Geralt, you've a mind for scansion. The soul of a poet, truly. Have you considered reworking your _dour, world-weary_ thing into something more—”

“Jaskier,” Geralt warns, but there's no heat behind it.

“Not to worry. We'll find you a lute and make a proper bard of you, my dashing companion,” Jaskier promises, and when Geralt, exasperated and all too fond, yanks him down to kiss him quiet, he's still smiling, the song still fresh on his lips.

**Author's Note:**

> Please do leave a comment! I love and cherish every one :)
> 
> I'm on tumblr at [bas-saarebas.](http://bas-saarebas.tumblr.com)


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